OTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING, the first of the truly German dramatists, was born in a Lutheran clergyman's family.

Lessing was not only the first truly German playwright, but he is known, too, as the "father of German criticism." Notable among his critical works is the celebrated Hamburg Dramaturgy which should have added materially to its author's income.

Lessing's literary activity continued with unimpaired mental vigor right up to the time of his sudden death while on a trip to Brunswick in 1781.

Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Kermānshāh, Persia (now Iran), of British parents.

Lessing’s central achievement, Children of Violence, describes the career of Martha Quest from rural central African beginnings to her later years in an England on its way to moral and technological disintegration.

Lessing turned away from realism and entered the realm of fantasy and science fiction with her five-volume space saga Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979-1983).

Lessing was, in fact, not the first German writer to challenge this tradition, but it is fair to say that his play marks the decisive break with the classical French drama that still dominated the German stage.

Lessing interpreted Aristotle's famous and much-discussed concept of tragic catharsis (purging) as meaning the emotional release that follows tension generated in spectators who witness tragic events; he concludes that the sensations evoked by pity and fear should afterward exert a moral influence on the audience by being transformed into virtuous action.

Lessing's last work, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1780; The Education of the Human Race), is a treatise that closely reflects the working of his mind and expresses his belief in the perfectibility of the human race.

Lessing disliked being pigeon-holed like this, insisting it was the whole of the human condition not just a part that fired her imagination.

Lessing's new book, The Grandmothers, is a collection of four novellas, and it shows that at the age of 84 she remains firmly committed to the belief that all "isms" -- and even most ordinary emotions -- are forms of self-delusion.

Lessing isn't a cynic, for she still believes in the value (and existence) of truth, and she lacks the injured sense of self-pity that motivates the cynic.

Doris Lessing (born 1919) was a South African expatriate writer known for her strong sense of feminism.

Lessing's childhood was spent in the hills near the farm.

Lessing also experimented with science fiction and fantasy: from 1979 to 1983 she wrote four novels, the "Canopus in Argos: Archives" series, which involve a struggle between good and evil set forth amidst galactic empires over thirty thousand years.

Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out.

Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood.

Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa.

Lessing's formal education came to an end in 1932 when she was a mere thirteen years old.

Writing quickly became Lessing's means of becoming what she was "capable of being." In 1949, she moved to London, and a year later published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, the story of a white farmer and his African servant in Rhodesia.

The novel is one of Lessing's most complex, painting multiple portraits of contemporary women and the challenge of meaningful introspection.

Lessing overlooked that Corneille and Racine must somehow have been rooted in the national soil in order to become the classical authors of a great nation; he overlooked that their tragedies were rich in theatrical effects and full of powerful tension for their contemporaries.

In Livy’s famous story, the young Lessing saw first the most revolting and striking accompaniment of social oppression: the attack on virginal honor which was as topical in the eighteenth century as it had been two thousand years before, as it still is to-day and will be as long as social oppression exists.

Lessing revealed his dramatic instinct in recognizing the general historical import of this tragic problem as far more important than the single case which had been the cause of a political revolution.

Lessing's influence on the Disney enterprise has been difficult to determine due to the sinister spin most Disney chroniclers give to his career at the studio.

Lessing was also a member of the Short Subjects Committee for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, and arranged to have Walt Disney taken out of the country on a good-will tour of South America in 1941 while Lessing and Roy Disney handled the labor negotiations.

Lessing was also thrust in the firing lines to tackle difficult situations such as the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s where he served as Walt Disney's close advisor.

During several years Lessing was one of the contributors to Madame Neuber's Leipzig theater; but his dramatic principles, as they defined themselves, became more and more opposed both to those of Voltaire and the Leipzig school.

In 1767 Lessing became associated with a group of actors in Hamburg, at which place he wrote the justly celebrated Hamburg Dramaturgy, in which he explained to the world the principles underlying the art of the theater.

In 1772 Lessing wrote the tragedy Emilia Galotti, whose central situation is the same as that in the story of Virginia and Appius Claudius.

Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran) and grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father made an unsuccessful attempt to farm maize.

Lessing married at the age of 20, but three years later, feeling stifled by colonial life and increasingly distressed by the racism of her society, she joined the Communist Party, "because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives."

Lessing's African stories painted a grim picture of white colonialism and the oppression of fl Africans, and in 1956, Lessing was declared a prohibited alien in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.

Lessing's mother similarly obsesses her: she is present in the characters of Mrs Quest, Jane Somers, Maudie Fowler, and others.

Likewise, Lessing's self-representational writings, both "fictive" and "deliberate", are examples of Lessing's conception of "self" at different stages of her life and psychic development.

Therefore in conclusion, I suggest that Lessing's self-representational writing is a form of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy which is therapeutic and may involve wish-fulfilment or dreaming because Lessing, uses the position of author to act as psychoanalyst and character simultaneously.

This site primarily provides a catalog of Lessing works, but also includes biographical information, a Lessing bibliography, a list of the awards Lessing has received, a link to a lengthy 1999 interview in The Progressive and to a transcript of her online chat at BarnesAnd Noble.com.

When she was five her family moved to a farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in an isolated part of Africa that had not been settled before by white people.

Lessing left school at the age of fourteen in rebellion against her mother.

She joined the Communist Party and married the German political activist Gottfried Lessing, who later became the German ambassador to Uganda and was accidentally killed in the 1979 revolt against Idi Amin.

Lessing's second marriage did not succeed and in 1949 she moved to England with her youngest child and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which appeared in 1950.

Noah Lessing was a Human Starfleet officer who was stationed on board the USS Equinox when it was pulled into the Delta Quadrant by the Caretaker.

Lessing survived the first few years of the vessel's voyage through the quadrant, until the USS Voyager caught up with the Equinox.

The fate of the character or his life on Voyager after the events of "Equinox, Part II" were never portrayed on screen, however the non-canon Pocket VOY novel "Homecoming" by Christie Golden mentions that Lessing returned to the Alpha Quadrant along with the rest of Voyager's crew.

Lessing whether she felt it was extremely difficult to convey the sense of a "mystical" experience in the framework of fiction, of any kind of work intended to communicate naturalistically to a large audience.

Lessing was understandably reticent about her own writingand perhaps I embarrassed her by my own enthusiasm, though I did not tell her that she was quite mistaken in her feeling that her writing might not have the effect she desired: The Golden Notebook alone has radically changed the consciousness of many young women.

Lessing cannot return to the country of her childhood and girlhood, Southern Rhodesia, because she is a "prohibited immigrant"; homesick for the veldt, she had her daughter send her several color photographs of African flowers, which are on display in her flat).

A political novelist first and foremost, Lessing uses her futuristic fable to comment on the sins and foibles of humanity as it is now--on war and slavery, sexism and racism--and on its one saving grace, the ability to love.

Sporting less philosophy and more "adventure" (and not as challenging to read as many of Lessing's books), the novel seems aimed at a broader audience; I even suspect she may have written this story with the "young adult" market in mind.

Lessing's plot is modeled after a sword-and-dragon tale: their parents slaughtered, siblings Mara and Dann are spirited away from their homeland during the calamities prompted by an unrelenting famine and drought.

DORIS LESSING: I look at him, and I think that's a young man. I-- when I was a child, there was a soldier.

DORIS LESSING: Well there, he was in the Royal Free Hospital in London-- where he-- when they'd cut off his leg.

I mean, here's a story of an upper middle class family, who's benign view of the world is shattered by the violent death of this child, who is monstrous in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong, demanding and brutal.

Doris Lessing was born in Persia (present-day Iran) to British parents in 1919.

The books in the 'Children of Violence' series (1952-69) are strongly influenced by Lessing's rejection of a domestic family role and her involvement with communism.

Doris Lessing's recent fiction includes Ben, in the World (2000), a sequel to the The Fifth Child, and, The Sweetest Dream (2001), which follows the fortunes of a family through the twentieth century, set in London during the 1960s and contemporary Africa.

Doris Lessing burst upon the British literary scene in 1950 with her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and she has remained at the top ever since.

Doris Lessing's literary career spans more than four decades; consequently her texts, both fiction and nonfiction, are valuable at the most basic level as historical records that tackle the central political, spiritual, and psychological questions of the...

Doris Lessing, whose long career as a novelist, short story writer, and essayist began in the mid-twentieth century, is considered among the most important writers of the modern postwar era.

She is a romantic idealistic in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to...

A rich and penetrating portrait of Lessing's homeland, African Laughter recounts the visits she made to Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989, and 1992, afte r being exiled from the old Southern Rhodesia for 25 years for her opposition to the minority white government.

Doris Lessing's compelling new novel of a drought-plagued future takes readers inside the heart and soul of a truly memorable heroine--one whose struggle for survival cannot extinguish her passion for knowledge.

It is not without reason that scholars refer to the “riddle” or “mystery” of Lessing, a mystery that has proved intractable because of his reticence on the subject of the final conclusions of his intellectual project.

On the basis of intensive study of the entire corpus of Lessing's philosophical and theological writings as well as the extensive secondary literature, it leads the reader into the systematic core of Lessing's highly elusive religious thought.

From a detailed and thoroughgoing analysis of Lessing's developing position on Christianity and reason, there emerges a fresh image of Lessing as a creative modern mind, both shaped by and giving shape to the Christian heritage.